Sculpture Garden | Luis Sahagun: An Old God Renewed

Opens October 23, 2016 in the RAC Sculpture Garden
Opening Reception: Sunday, October 23 from 3-6pm

“In the beginning there was only darkness.
The atmosphere had no taste.
Anonymous ancestors magically appeared,
Alvaro’s History was erased.

Angels came to hear him sing,
For it was the rise of a new king.”
-Creation Story

Luis Sahagun An Old God Renewed, 2016 wood, drywall, cement, screws, spray paint, acrylic, oil, resin, & metal Courtesy the artist — Luis Sahagun
An Old God Renewed, 2016
wood, drywall, cement, screws, spray paint, acrylic, oil, resin, & metal
Courtesy the artist

Luis Sahagun creates paintings, sculptures and objects that serve as icons of an invented personal mythology. He is interested in the overlap of memory, imagination, and his own ancestral legacy and art, and describes himself as as “a quixotic artist who channels the working ethics of a construction worker on a romantic quest to use art to empower working class sensibilities.”

Sahagun’s practice is deeply informed by his experience as a laborer, construction worker and product designer. Instead of the painter’s traditional brush, palette knife and canvas, Sahagun employs saws, knives, and engineered wood particle board as his primary tools and media. These modes of production have led Sahagun to develop an idiosyncratic personal vernacular that remains proudly embedded within the everyday realities of his blue-collar upbringing. He describes his outdoor sculpture An Old God Renewed as “an anthropomorphic panther that serves as a portal for human souls to exit our realm and enter the mythology that I have constructed.” Within the Panther’s eye is a depiction of the moon, which provides the symbolic source of energy for the portal’s ability to function.

Importantly for Sahagun, the moon also represents a world where “the fallen…friends and family members that have been murdered due to the violence found within my own Chicago Southland community” now reside. The sculpture is Sahagun’s offering to this familiar yet strange, distant yet ever-present “old god,” the moon. Through symbol, metaphor, and mythic storytelling, Sahagun’s works construct a viscerally powerful alternative vision of Chicago community history, through which we may ponder the minute alongside the infinite, the mundane in concert with the divine.